Dec 20 2020 Bluetooth on linux: disabling builtin adapter

I tried many things. Bluetooth on linux just still, sort of, doesn’t really work reliably ? If you are here you know what I mean.

The simplest solution is frequently to swap the builtin adapter with an external dongle, which has better support.

But the tools (GUI, …) really aren’t built to work well with two bt adapters, so in order to use the dongle in a sane way you will need to disable the builtin adapter somehow.

For me the following did not work: * Blacklisting the module btintel: the module was still loaded, if manually removed, there were errors. * Manually removing the module from kernel.

The thing is that builtin bluetooth dongle comes on the same hardware as the wifi adapter in most cases.

So to use the dongle I had to disable the builtin adaptor through udev rules. Following the instructions here for the most part.